Despite international condemnation, Israelis continue to build settlements beyond the Green Line. 

In 1972, there were just over 10,000 Israeli settlers, with 1,500 living in the West Bank and the rest in East Jerusalem. Two decades later, by the time of the Oslo Peace Accords, there were 231,200 Israelis living in the territories. That number rose to 365,000 by 2000, when the second Palestinian uprising began, and 470,000 by the time Benjamin Netanyahu became Israel’s prime minister for a second time in 2009. As many as 750,000 Israeli settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem now live on Palestinian land in communities heavily subsidized by the Israeli government. 

Settlements range from small wildcat outposts on West Bank hilltops to developed towns with shopping malls, schools, and suburban homes. The outposts are built without official approval from the Israeli government, but with its financial support, and eventually most of them are “legalized.”  

Israel has used its settlements to control and misappropriate Palestinian water supplies. The Oslo Convention estimated the quantity of groundwater in the Palestinian territories at approximately 734 million cubic meters. Palestinians were allocated a mere 235 million cubic meters of this water while the rest went to Israel. The Joint Water Committee, set up under Oslo II in 1995, gave Israel a sole veto over all water projects, which has ensured that settlements receive the lion’s share of West Bank water.  

Settlers and soldiers have together used violence to prevent Palestinian farmers from accessing their land and in some cases forced them to leave their villages, thereby making way for settler expansion. Far-right settlers Bezalel Smotrich (Minister of Finance) and Itamar Ben-Gvir (Minister of National Security), who are currently playing leading roles in Netanyahu’s coalition government, have given the settler movement the green light to expand throughout “Eretz Israel.”  A string of settlements is now planned that will divide the north from the south of the West Bank and prevent the emergence of a Palestinian state.

Settlements have been repeatedly condemned as a violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention and deemed illegal by the UN Security Council and other UN bodies. The International Court of Justice ruled that both the occupation and settlements were illegal in a July 2024 advisory opinion.